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eewiz
20Core CPU !! I want to buy one of these for my Desktop :) BTW IMO AMD is too ...
hm
How effective are Windows and Linux to exploit the real power this muliti core ...
Update: AMD on core wars and beyond
Rick Merritt
11/9/2010 8:35 AM EST
"In 2011 we will deliver multiple APUs targeting multiple markets and our competitor will only have one targeting a specific spot in the market," said Moore, referring to archrival Intel. "And we are delivering a much clearer vision of architectural integration for graphics and compute cores," he said.
Moore outlined AMD's plan to evangelize the industry to help develop the software needed for merged x86, graphics chips. The stack includes new runtime environments, domain libraries and high-level frameworks.
AMD aims to make graphics equal citizens with x86 cores. The two will share unified virtual address space that is part of page-able system memory. GPUs on and off the main processor will be brought into the CPUs cache coherent memory domain, and ultimately GPUs will support context switching, Moore said.
Many of the features require support from partners such as Microsoft and developers of the OpenCL standard for multicore programming. For example AMD plans to deliver a GOU with a hardware scheduler with close OS integration.
"Any app in user mode will be able to use the GPU without talking to the OS or device drivers, making a direct connection to offload work with new task-parallel queuing runtimes," said Moore.
The future runtimes could be upgrades of today's OpenCL and Microsoft DirectCompute runtimes or new software such as ConcRT, GCD or TBB, he said.
AMD will also take some steps on its own. For example, it will support bi-directional movement of available power between CPU and GPU cores. It also plans a higher bandwidth on-chip memory controller.
AMD wants to develop a software stack for its Fusion chips.
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DF
11/9/2010 2:56 PM EST
What I'm itching to know is what the performance of the 9W 1.0GHz dual-core Ontario is versus Atom. If it's a lot faster, then we might have quite the 10" netbook platform on our hands.
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rick.merritt
11/9/2010 3:49 PM EST
AMD may sit on performance numbers until systems ship at CES, but I ask
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rick.merritt
11/9/2010 4:03 PM EST
OK, AMD won't give benchmarks until Jan. launch but would say Zacate up to 80 to 90 GFlops, if that is meaningful.
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Robotics Developer
11/10/2010 3:34 PM EST
I would be curious to know if there is any interest in using graphic processors for general purpose processing. It would seem to me that this would be an interesting marriage that might avoid the hybrid approach currently being pursued. I must confess to not having tried to use a GPU as a general purpose processor but in an earlier life I worked with array processors. The array processors could do general work (and often did) the difference was the compiler. Given the right compiler a Graphics Engine could perform as a general purpose computer, could the next big step forward not be hardware but software?
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Random Roman
11/11/2010 4:51 AM EST
Well, there are a lot of workloads, where traditional superscalars beats gpu's. So it would be more practical to design such a general-purpose compiler for a cpu/gpu heterogeneous system. Actually this is what OpenCL is made for.
And there is another important point. Gpu-like architecture tuned for general purpose workloads would be less effective for graphics.
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hm
11/12/2010 12:09 AM EST
How effective are Windows and Linux to exploit the real power this muliti core processors? If we were to write new applications, how effectively is it allowed by OS to employ many processors? Is it possible to quantify improvement in speed of application with increase in number of processors?
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eewiz
11/29/2010 1:51 AM EST
20Core CPU !! I want to buy one of these for my Desktop :) BTW IMO AMD is too late to the party with 9W Ontario chip. The netbook market is already spiraling down.
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